August 6, 2010 | 2:24 pm

Shame on the MPAA

Posted by Rob Eshman

The only good that may come out of the MPAA’s shortsighted decision to give the documentary “A Film Unfinished” an R rating is that the spurt of controversy the action has caused might make more people aware of this important and powerful film.

Last night the Simon Wiesenthal Center screened the movie,  Afterwards I interviewed director Yael Hersonski on stage and moderated a Q & A between her and the 200 or so people in attendance.

Now I read that the MPAA has reaffirmed its initial R rating for “A Film Unfinished,” after a protest by the filmmakers and survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto, and I am astounded.  An R rating means that teenagers who might otherwise see the movie will not be able to—most schools do not show R rated movies, People who are morally opposed to R movies—a broad swath of the Christian community—will refrain from seeing it.  It’s not like millions of people line up to see most documentaries, so the number of people this will affect is likely small, but the message it sends is lousy. To give a movie of such historic and moral import an R does a deep disservice to Holocaust education, and sets a dangerous precedent.  The younger generation takes in most of its information through moving digital images, and A Film Unfinished is fundamentally about how those images can be used to deceive.

The film first shows footage taken by the Nazis inside the Warsaw Ghetto, where 400,000 mostly Polish Jews were imprisoned during World War II, before being ultimately deported to Treblinka concentration camp, where the Germans murdered them.  The footage, recovered from an East German archive and labeled simply, “Ghetto,” shows a deceptively benign place where Jewish life continues almost as normal.  Then Hersonski shows footage of more recent footage, a missing reel or two of out takes from the original film, which shows the truth behind “Ghetto’s” lies.  This footage shows clearly that the first film contained staged sequences with outside actors and multipole takes.  In other words, the Nazis created a fiction film under the guise of documentary, to propagate a completly fake “historic record” of the ghetto and Jews.  If they had won the war, this would have passed for Ken Burns.

Hersonki pieces this all together in a concise, gripping and thoughtful way.  In conversation last night, she speculated that the purpose of the movie was to be a kind of film archive of the soon to be extinct Jewish people.  Her interest in how films and the notions of archive can be used to twist truth led her to make the movie. You can read more about why, in her own words, here.

What a slap in the face the rating is to a film as good as this and a filmmaker as serious. There are two scenes of nudity—dead bodies and prisoners made to enter a ritual bath nude—but in context these scenes are entirely appropriate and educational, if painful.

I asked Hersonski if there’s anything the public can do to convince the MPAA to change its mind.  She said no.  In that case, just make sure you see the movie.

August 4, 2010 | 2:10 pm

Welcome to Arizona

Posted by JewishJournal.com

By Elissa Barrett
Elissa Barrett is the Executive Director of the Progressive Jewish Alliance.  Last week she documented her journey in words and pictures on twitter.

“Welcome to Hell,” said Maricopa County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox only half jokingly to the hundreds of people packed into St. Matthews Catholic Church a mile’s march from City Hall in Phoenix.  At 4:00 am that morning (July 29, 2010), I boarded a bus bound for Arizona, one among many filled with Los Angeles County Federation of Labor members and an assortment of Jewish, Muslim and Christian clergy.  Undeterred by the 14-hour roundtrip, we sped through the desert on our way to protest SB 1070, portions of which went into effect that day despite federal judge Susan Bolton’s partial injunction.

Wilcox’s greeting, while somewhat stark, summarizes the range of views about Arizona.  For the ranchers and El Norte side border dwellers who view with growing concern the northward spread of Mexico’s drug wars, Arizona is a land of terror and uncertainty.  My own family is no stranger to these fears:  my sister and her family have lived in El Paso, Texas for almost a decade.  She used to cross the border every month to staff a free reproductive health clinic, but no more.  For years before the cartel wars exploded, she and other health workers witnessed a growing scourge of murders targeting women who labored in Juarez’s NAFTA enabled factories:  the proverbial canaries in the coal mine.

For the men, women and children who flee endemic poverty and violence, Arizona has long been a land of refuge, hope and opportunity – recently transformed into hostile territory treacherous for many mixtas (families whose members have varying citizenship status).  At St. Matthews Church we heard the gut wrenching stories of those families.

There was the young woman whose mother fled domestic violence when the girl was a toddler and who did not discover she herself was undocumented until the passage of Proposition 300 stripped her of the public scholarships she had won to attend Arizona State University.  Or take the residents of Guadalupe, AZ – population 5,000 – who were rounded up en masse before SB 1070 even went into effect and subjected to warrantless detention by deputies, often untrained civilians christened and armed by local law enforcement.  And what about the young Marine, an Iraq War veteran, whose words came out in a choked staccato as he recounted the racist invectives and unceasing questions of border police he encounters following each visit to see relatives in Sonora, Mexico – pulled over for the crime of “driving while brown.”

One may say – Certainly, we can sympathize with the human suffering of these individuals, but what about the jobs “those people” are taking from us law-abiding, tax paying U.S. citizens?

On July 8, 2010, United Farm Workers President Arturo Rodriguez appeared on television as part of a national “Take Our Jobs” Campaign designed to recruit citizens and legal residents for jobs usually filled by undocumented farm workers and to urge enactment of federal immigration reform.  The U.S. Bureau of Labor rates farm work as one of the 10 most dangerous jobs in the nation.  Each summer, scores of workers around the country die from heat and dehydration.  Over 5,000 people have responded to “Take Our Jobs” so far.  Once they found out what the job entailed, however, only 3 were willing to work the hot Arizona fields, land that yields 25% of all lettuce consumed in America.

The stories we heard in Phoenix are not new, even if they are laced with the specific circumstances of the moment.  On our bus, people told the stories of their relatives and ancestors who had journeyed to and within America.  Some were freed slaves who left the agricultural south for the industrialized north, while others fled the dustbowl of Oklahoma to farm California’s bread basket. Some came from the shifting borders of Eastern Europe in search of di goldene medine (the golden land) or left Scandinavia in search of opportunity.  These stories remind us of the fluidity of borders and the extent to which borders are often constructs of time, geography and political power, the results of which we see in conflict zones like Iraq, Yugoslavia or Rwanda. 

But borders can also be inhospitable wastelands.  That is what struck me the most during our journey to and from Phoenix.  The desert you pass through is nothing but hour after hour of unrelenting sun, sky and sand.  No water.  No shelter.  No food.  No mercy.  I thought – A person must be desperate, driven by a dream or traumatized by terror, to cross this divide.  I thought of the New York Times report last week about the morgues in Arizona border cities filled to overflowing with the bodies of people who made that desperate crossing and failed. 

None of these complex realities point to a simple solution.  On the one hand, the need for federal legislative reform is clear, and is perhaps the only thing about which everyone can agree.  On the other hand, that legislation must humanely and pragmatically address the economic realities of migrant workers and mixta communities while providing meaningful border security.  Now more than ever we need courage and vision to tackle the complexities of immigration reform head on.  We need to resist the instinct to circle the wagons and, instead, welcome all the stories, from all sides.  Perhaps those stories, like the ones I heard in Phoenix, will help provide some of the political courage so lacking in Washington nowadays. 

Last week I was welcomed to hell.  But I was also welcomed to a land of promise.  I was welcomed to the complexity that is Arizona, the dream that is America.  As Phoenix City Councilmember Mike Johnson said, “We will only find our way if we believe that this is about Justice, not Just About Us.”

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August 3, 2010 | 4:05 pm

Director fights “R” rating on Warsaw Ghetto film

Posted by  Tom Tugend

A documentary on the Warsaw Ghetto has been given an “R” rating by the Motion Picture Assn. of America (MPAA), triggering concern whether historical footage on starvation and death can be shown in high schools for educational purposes.

The film’s distributor, Oscilloscope Laboratories, announced immediately that it will appeal the decision, with Beastie Boy Adam Yauch, founder and head of Oscilloscope, commenting, “MPAA has really gone too far this time. It’s bullshit.”

Story continues after the break.

Yael Hersonski, the Israeli director of the documentary, put it more politely. “I realize this may be a difficult film to watch, but it enables us to approach the Holocaust in particularly illuminating way,” she told The Journal.

“I wish I had had a chance to see such films as a teenager, and I think high school teachers should have the opportunity to decide whether to use it in their classes,” added Hersonski, whose grandmother was a Warsaw Ghetto survivor.

Yauch and Hersonski will appeal the MPAA rating at a hearing Thursday morning (Aug. 5), with the board expected to come up with a final verdict the same day.

In its original “R” rating, which bars viewing the film to anyone under 17 unaccompanied by a parent or guardian, MPAA cited the documentary’s “disturbing images of Holocaust atrocities, including graphic nudity” (the latter a Nazi-coerced scene of five young women in a mikveh).

“A Film Unfinished” consists mainly of four reels of raw footage shot in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942. Long considered authentic, a recently discovered fifth reel shows that the project was part of a planned, but never released, Nazi propaganda movie.

The film will be released Aug. 20 in Los Angeles and reviewed in an upcoming issue of The Journal.

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